Terada - Looking Away (Selections).pdf - Townsend Humanities Lab

168 looking away
nore. Rounding off a description into a law in the making—or to put it a
different way, evidence for the possibility of a law into a law—is Hegel’s
signature rhetorical move, Adorno points out:
Without...thereality of a class society that stands as the very principle
of bourgeois society, there would have been neither the huge population
increase that we have seen, nor the growth in transport, nor
would there ever have been anything like enough by way of food supplies
for the population. It will not have escaped your attention that
the starting-point of a critique of this entire way of seeing is the idea
(one that Hegel pursued with especial rigor right on into the heart of
his Logic) that from the outset reality is given precedence over possibility.
And of course it is here that we see that unquestioned parti pris
for the prevailing [durchsetzende] universal of which I have already
spoken at some length [in Lecture 5 of History and Freedom—R.T.].
To recapitulate, then, the fact is that mankind has survived not just in
spite of but because of conflict, which has such weighty consequences
for the theory of history because Hegel has inferred from it with a
very great semblance of justice [Schein von Recht], a semblance of
justice that cannot be dismissed out of hand, that categorically, in
terms of the idea, when looked at from above, life can be reproduced
only by virtue of conflict. And this has resulted in what might be
termed the theodicy of conflict. 28 (HF 51–52, translation modified,
my italics; NaS 13:76–77)
28. Hegel’s optimism “is not a mere mockery” as long as the species proceeds by virtue
of its conflicts as it has done so far (HF 51). What would it take to refute it? Evidence
for the non-inevitability of the course of the world might be furnished, on the
one hand, by a transformation of the world and “establishment of humanity” (HF 146;
NaS 13, 206); a discontinuous messianic model of transformation might provide such
an alternative to Hegelian history. Or, on the other hand, Hegel would be refuted as
soon as it becomes clear that history isn’t survivable; when that happens, no one will feel
up to enjoying the demise of Hegel’s reputation.
At times, Adorno considers that the genocide of European Jews and other twentiethcentury
disasters do constitute this evidence: “The catastrophe there was not just a disaster
predicted by Spengler, but an actual reality, one that makes all talk of progress toward
freedom seem ludicrous. The concept of the autonomous human subject is refuted